Underlying every thought, heartbeat and movement are ion channels, busily conducting high-speed streams of ions into cells, like subway trains coursing through tunnels. Ion channels span the cellular membrane, forming passageways, or pores, through which ions flow down electrochemical gradients. Despite extensive studies of ion channels dating back more than 50 years, crucial structural pieces of the puzzle were still missing that would explain how the high-throughput transmission of ions is achieved, how channels discriminate between ions, and how they open and close in a fraction of a millisecond.
One team is helping put those pieces together. Since 1998, Roderick MacKinnon, head of molecular neurobiology and biophysics, Rockefeller University, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator, and colleagues have published papers revealing the potassium and chloride channel structures.1,2 In May the group published its latest findings, which show what the potassium channel looks like when it is open and how ...
